Sol y Tierra / Sun and Earth: Views Beyond the U.S.–Mexico Border, 1988–2018 | Hardcover

A border tells you where one country ends. It tells you considerably less about the people living on either side of it.

Over the course of thirty years, photographer Emily Matyas traveled through Mexico documenting everyday life just south of the U.S.–Mexico border:  families, landscapes, celebrations, work, hardship, and all the ordinary moments that rarely survive the simplified stories we tell about places.

Sol y Tierra / Sun and Earth brings those years together in 82 photographs, moving between black-and-white and color to create a portrait of Mexico that feels intimate rather than observational from a distance. Accompanied by writing from voices on both sides of the border, the book asks a deceptively simple question:  how different do people remain once you spend enough time actually looking at one another?

The Details

• Photographs by Emily Matyas
• Foreword by Kirsten Rian
• Contributions by Amparo Wong Molina, Sergio Anaya + Linda Valdez
• 111 pages
• 82 photographs
• 57 black-and-white + 25 color photographs
• 9" × 11"
• Trade paperback
• ISBN: 978-1-942084-63-1
• Published by Daylight Books

About the Photographer: Emily Matyas

Emily Matyas seems less interested in photographing the idea of a place than in figuring out what life there actually looks like. A U.S.-based photographer and educator, Matyas spent three decades photographing communities in Mexico, using images to look across physical and cultural boundaries and toward the considerably more complicated people living beyond them.